Recently, an ordinary user may easily record a video and generate an animation, and Internet sites are full of various kinds of moving image contents. For example, when a user views a content having a short viewing time (which may be hereinafter referred to as a short clip content) using a personal computer via the Internet, there is a mode for continuously viewing a plurality of contents in a similar manner to a television receiver.
For example, a major moving image site provides a function for allowing a user to generate a playlist by selecting a plurality of contents in advance to continuously reproduce the contents. Related contents are used as means for searching for an interesting content from among many contents, and by following related contents, a user may discover a content that has not been discovered until then from a field of contents preferred by the user.
Further, the major moving image site has a function of allowing a user to select and reproduce contents by displaying related contents related to a reproduced content, such as “suggestions” and “recommendations”.
In this mode, however, when a user selects a related content, the currently reproduced content is stopped. Therefore, when a user wants to subsequently reproduce the related content, it is necessary for the user to select a related content every time a reproduction is finished.
In this case, if a function is provided to generate a playlist in advance by searching for contents by following related contents without reproducing any moving image content, the selected contents may be reproduced continuously.
However, it takes much time to do this operation, and moreover, the user is required to be engaged in this operation during this operation. Thus, it is very inconvenient for the user to generate a long playlist. If only a short playlist is generated, it takes only a short time to finish reproducing the playlist including short clip contents, and the user has to generate a playlist again.